Jacob Laksin has
written a general critique of my work for FrontPageMagazine.com. To the extent
that this article is based on any rational criticism at all, it relies on a
compendium of the criticisms that I have already replied to on this
website. The main technique is to present quotations from my work devoid
of context and devoid of the evidence that I use to back up what I have written.
It therefore relies on people not having read my work and on accepting the
conventional wisdom on all things related to the role of Jews in the culture of
the West. Particularly egregious are the charges that my writing is "unabashed
anti-Semitism" and "stylized bigotry." Such comments are nothing more than
attempts at intimidation—effective
because they serve as a warning of the consequences to those who attempt to
understand and call attention to Jewish power and influence. As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
noted in their recent article on the Israel
Lobby, charges of anti-Semitism are to be expected for anyone who
claims that the Israel lobby has significant influence over U.S. foreign policy
or even that it exists. Their work has been subjected to a deluge of charges of
anti-Semitism and shoddy scholarship. It's no accident that perhaps the most
vitriolic anti-Mearsheimer and Walt piece to date appeared on FrontPageMagazine.com: Abraham H. Miller's The New
Protocols. (Miller begins by stating "Professors Stephen Walt
and John Mearsheimer’s recently disseminated anti-Semitic screed has
been ripped apart by both prominent scholars and literary figures showing it to
be an intellectual fraud being passed off as serious
scholarship." The essay ends with "Anti-Semites
have now found the new Protocols of the Elders of Zion.")

As a general
take-home point, I would emphasize the following quotation from my work as a
central focus of Laksin's ire: “Jews were
unique as an American immigrant group in their hostility toward American
Christian culture and in their energetic, aggressive efforts to change that
culture.” This is the bottom line, and I completely stand behind this claim
based on the research presented in The
Culture of Critique. Certainly Laksin does nothing in his article to
refute this claim. In the following I reply to Laksin's main points in red typeface. An essay-form version of this reply
is available here: The much shorter published version of my reply, along with
Laksin's rejoinder is here:

At
least since the unthinking attacks on Harvard’s E.O. Wilson in the
1970s, the self-appointed enforcers of political correctness have leveled
charges of “racism” at scholars of evolutionary psychology. For the most part,
the object of scorn has done little more than challenge unscientific
presumptions about the inherent goodness and equality of mankind. Every once in
a while, however, even the braying PC brigades get it right.

A
case in point is Kevin MacDonald, a
tenured professor of psychology at the California State University at Long
Beach, who has been denounced as an anti-Semite by, among others, the Southern
Poverty Law Center, an organization notoriously keen to pronounce anything
inconsistent with its far-Left assumptions as “hate” speech. But MacDonald is
indeed an anti-Semite -- even if the SPLC says
so.

Professional Anti-Semitism

For an academic, MacDonald has trod an
usual path. An anti-war student radical at the University of Wisconsin in the
sixties, MacDonald has since migrated to the opposite end of the political
spectrum becoming a passionate spokesman for his pseudo-scholarly thesis that
Judaism must be regarded as a self-interested “evolutionary strategy” created
and used by Jews to deprive non-Jews of resources in an ongoing, zero-sum
Kulturkampf. (Although MacDonald identifies himself as a “conservative,”
one can’t help but note the similarities between his writings on Jews and Karl
Marx’s “On the Jewish Question.”) That the thesis owes no debt to serious
scholarship has not deterred a gallery of anti-Semites from David Duke to Israel
Shamir from applauding it as an empirical confirmation of the innate wickedness
of the Jews.

The source of their enthusiasm is not far to seek. MacDonald’s writings
are distinguished by their scarcely disguised subtext that Jews are the enemies
of Western civilization. Reading through MacDonald’s books and articles one
finds that they bristle with indignation at what he sees as a calibrated Jewish
strategy for “destroying Europeans,” part and parcel of “the deep-seated Jewish
hostility toward traditional Western culture.” Indeed, the “Western intellectual
world has become Judaized,” merely one instance of Jewish “cultural imperium in
the West.” But the West is merely the latest target of the Jewish cultural
onslaught. Historically, MacDonald argues, Jews have been a “hostile
elite--hostile to the traditional people and cultures…they came to dominate.”
Far from assimilated, they nurse “historically conditioned
hatreds.”

MacDonald’s conspiratorial claims about the dangers of Jews, especially
Jewish intellectuals, find their most febrile exposition in his 1998 book, The Culture of
Critique, where he asserts that Jewish cognitive elites have worked in
an “overt and semi-cryptic manner” throughout the twentieth century to achieve
“cultural dominance” over “the European peoples.” As in Europe, so in America,
MacDonald avers: “Jews were unique as an American immigrant group in their
hostility toward American Christian culture and in their energetic, aggressive
efforts to change that culture.”

In line with these views, MacDonald is
determined to portray anti-Semitism as a rational defense mechanism against the
all-too-real threat of Jewish domination. “Western anti-Jewish movements have
tended to be in response to intense competition from Jews,” he assures readers
in his 1994 book on Jews, tellingly titled A People That Shall Dwell Alone.
MacDonald also sees much of value in anti-Semitic propaganda. In
Separation and its Discontents (1998), MacDonald states that “[w]hile
anti-Semitic attitudes and behaviors have undoubtedly often been influenced by
myths and fantasies about Jews, there is a great deal of anti-Jewish writing
that reflects the reality of between-group completion.” [Laksin states below that "Even the most elemental scholarly task
-- faithfully quoting one’s sources -- is beyond him." But he himself produces a
howler of a misquote here. Obviously, I wrote about competition, not
completion.] In other words, anti-Semites are right to see Jews as
an existential threat.

It is on the basis of that conviction
that MacDonald takes an understanding view of the Nazi Holocaust. Nazism, he
explains, was only a “mirror image of Judaism, with its emphasis on creating a
master race.” [The
quotation used by Laksin is actually a slightly reworded passage from
Judith Shulevitz’s critique of my work, where she
wrote, “Even the most extreme forms of anti-Semitism, such as Nazism, can be
seen not as aberrations but as ‘a mirror image’ of Judaism, with its emphasis on
creating a master race.” The fact is that I did not state that Judaism had an
emphasis on creating a master race, but by moving the quotation marks, Laksin
makes his readers think I did. (Again, even the most elemental scholarly task of
quoting sources accurately is beyond him, although in this case, it's reasonable
to suspect malice on his part.) This was Shulevitz’s attribution, and I reject
it as an oversimplification of my views. My comment to Laksin is the same as the
one I made to Shulevitz in January, 2000: I
describe several ways in which Nazism was a mirror image of Judaism, including a
powerful concern with socializing group members into accepting group goals and
with the importance of within-group cooperation in attaining these goals. An
important part of my view is that anti-Semites often envied Jews’ ethnic
cohesiveness. For example, I cite historian Steven A. Aschheim, who noted “the
perception that Jews maintained their cohesiveness and sense of identity under
all conceivable circumstances was a source of both fear and envy. Indeed, for
many antisemites this racial perseverance and historical continuity provided a
kind of mirror-image model worthy of emulation.”(Aschheim, S. E.. (1985).
“The Jew within”: The myth of “Judaization” in Germany. In The Jewish
Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War,
ed. J. Reinharz & W. Schatzberg.Hanover and London: University Press of
New England for Clark University, p. 239.)]

As for Hitler, the worst MacDonald can
bring himself to say is that the Führer’s murderous hatred of Jews, “although clearly having a basis in
reality, may well have been exaggerated.” Bearing in mind MacDonald’s relentless
depiction of Jews agents of cultural subversion, one can’t help but marvel at
his restraint. [Once again, Laksin
fails to provide the context for the quote. This is the entire quote, from
footnote 25 of Chapter 5 of A People That Shall Dwell Alone: "There is no
question that Hitler's perception that Jews and 'Aryans' were locked in an
intense competition was central to his world view (Bracher 1970; Gordon 1984;
see discussion in SAID [ch. 3]). These perceptions of economic
competition and Jewish economic domination, although clearly having a basis in
reality, may well have been exaggerated—a not uncommon aspect of anti‑Semitism
and one that is highly compatible with an evolutionary perspective (see SAID,
ch. 1)." Obviously, I was not talking about Hitler's
murderous hatred for Jews but his perceptions of economic competition and
domination. I have a more extended discussion of Hitler’s views on Jews in Chapter 5 of
Separation and Its Discontents. The exaggeration of negative views of
outgroups combined with some real elements is a well-known consequence of
psychological mechanisms of social identity discussed in Chapter 1 of
Separation and Its Discontents, but there is no way that I am rationalizing
or condoning genocidal ideology.]

MacDonald’s empathy for the Nazi
genocide has led him into natural alliances with those who deny its occurrence. Although he does not question that the Holocaust took place, MacDonald was happy
to testify, in January of 2000, on behalf of David Irving, when the disgraced
historian sued author Deborah Lipstadt on libel charges for naming him in her
1993 history of Holocaust denial as one of its leading exponents. (Irving lost.)
MacDonald allows that Irving is “not an ideal person.” As always, however,
MacDonald is eager to shift the blame onto the real culprits: the Jews. Thus he
maintains that Irving’s attraction to Holocaust denial can be seen in part as “a
reaction to his demonization by Jewish activist organizations.” [My reasons for testifying for Irving are discussed here. I do not mention
Irving's views on the Holocaust in that context, only his political views. This
is what I actually wrote in the passage quoted by Laksin: "David Irving is in many ways not an ideal
person. There is no doubt in my mind that he has strongly held political views
— although the extent to which this is a reaction to his
demonization by Jewish activist organizations is at least open to
conjecture."]

Portrait of a
Pseudo-Scholar

With its unambiguous animus against
Jews and Judaism, MacDonald’s work has unsurprisingly drawn charges of
anti-Semitism. MacDonald replies that he is a serious scholar. “For me the only
issue is whether I have been honest in my treatment of sources and whether my
conclusions meet the usual standards of scholarly research in the social
sciences,” MacDonald has written. By his own standards, however, MacDonald’s
writings on Jews and Judaism are a spectacular failure.

Not the least of the problems is his
thesis. Stripped of its serious-sounding academese, MacDonald’s claim boils down
to this: Highly intelligent Jewish leaders have continuously sought to advance
Jewish ethnic interest at the expense of, and indeed to the detriment of,
non-Jewish Europeans and Americans. But as MacDonald himself acknowledges,
“Jewish intellectuals led the battle against the idea that races even exist and
against the idea that there are differences in intelligence or cultural level
between the races that are rooted in biology.” To account for this
contradiction, which makes a mockery of his work, MacDonald has had to invent a
decidedly conspiratorial account of Jewish motives. Jews, he explains, are in “denial” about their
aims, or else have succumbed to “self-deception.” Elsewhere MacDonald laments
that Jews “can’t see their ethnic commitments even when they are obvious to
everyone else.” Or, more accurately, to Kevin MacDonald.

[I do argue that
strongly identified Jews were the backbone of the battle against the concept of
race in Chapter 2 of The Culture of Critique. I also wrote about Jewish
self-deception in Chapter 8 of Separation and Its Discontents, and I give
some evidence for self-deception among Jewish leftists regarding their ethnic
commitments in Chapter 3 of Culture of Critique. Nevertheless, I do
not deal with issues of self-deception among the Boasians, although, I must say,
it sounds like a great topic.Ironically given that Laksin's piece appeared on http://www.FrontPageMag.com/,
Exhibit A of self-deception among radical Jews in The Culture of Critique
comes from David Horowitz's memoir of his radical parents in his book,
Radical Son. Here's one quote:

What my parents had done in joining the
Communist Party and moving to Sunnyside was to return to the ghetto. There
was the same shared private language, the same hermetically sealed universe,
the same dual posturing revealing one face to the outer world and another to
the tribe. More importantly, there was the same conviction of being marked
for persecution and specially ordained, the sense of moral superiority
toward the stronger and more numerous goyim outside. And there was
the same fear of expulsion for heretical thoughts, which was the fear that
riveted the chosen to the faith.

If these people thought that they had ceased being Jews when the joined the
CPUSA, self-deception certainly seems to be just about the only plausible
explanation for it. As historian Paul Lyons notes, during the period 1936–1956
“most Jewish Communists wear their Jewishness very casually but experience it
deeply. It is not a religious or even an institutional Jewishness for most;
nevertheless, it is rooted in a subculture of identity, style, language, and
social network. . . . In fact, this second-generation Jewishness was antiethnic
and yet the height of ethnicity. The emperor believed that he was clothed in
transethnic, American garb, but Gentiles saw the nuances and details of his
naked ethnicity.”Lyons, P. (1982).
Philadelphia Communists, 1936–1956. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
p. 73.]

It hardly helps MacDonald’s case that
his modus operandi is essentially polemical rather than scholarly. He
deliberately strives to paint a negative picture of Jews, a fact he does not
deny. “In the end, does it really matter if my motivation at this point is less
than pristine?” MacDonald asks. [Laksin leaves out the next
line: "Isn't the only
question whether I am right?" The point is that motives have nothing to do with truth.] Similarly, in explaining why he
penned a new introduction to The Culture of Critique, his assault on
Jewish intellectuals, MacDonald notes that the new introduction “tilts the
balance in my writing even more on the side of the negative.” That this has led
him to exclude all evidence that may reflect positively on Jews is something
MacDonald readily admits. There may be good Jews, he allows, but “my book has no
interest in recording fond memories of individual Jews.” A scholar of integrity
might have considered evidence at odds with his thesis. MacDonald’s only concern
is to disparage Jews. [All I am saying is that I am
trying to understand Jewish influence and paint an accurate picture of that.
Obviously, individual fond memories are irrelevant to this question.]

Even the most elemental scholarly task
-- faithfully quoting one’s sources -- is beyond him. On the academic website
H-Net.org, David Lieberman has extensively
demonstrated how MacDonald has misrepresented the work of author Jaff Schatz
in order to portray Jewish communists as the “core” members of Communist
Poland’s brutal security service. For MacDonald, the supposed prevalence of Jews
“reinforced the popular image of Jews as servants of foreign interests and
enemies of ethnic Poles” and therefore anti-Semitism was in some measure a
logical reaction to Jewish sins against Polish culture. But in fact Schatz noted
that Jews made up only a small share of the security service and moreover there
was a malicious campaign to inflate the number of Jews in the security service.
MacDonald, typically, was willing to fudge facts to cast Jews in an unflattering
light. More recently, he has taken to distorting the work of historian Yuri
Slezkine, author of The Jewish Century. Asked about MacDonald’s use of
his work to further his anti-Jewish theories, Slezkine told FrontPageMag.com
that he had “much to disagree with” in MacDonald’s interpretation.

I deny any misquoting or
misinterpretation and have
replied at length to Lieberman and Schatz on my
website. Laksin focuses on Lieberman’s complaints about my claim that Jews had
an exaggerated role in the security service.
My argument, citing Schatz, was that Jewish communists
who identified as Jews formed the core of the security service, at least until
the mid-1950s, and that efforts were made to minimize the appearance of Jewish
involvement in the government generally by, for example, changing their names to
Polish-sounding names. The exaggerated role of Jews in the Polish security
service from 1944–1956 is also discussed in the November 2005 issue of the
Bulletin of the
Polish Institute of National Remembrance.
A
translation of some of this material is available on
my website.

Laksin also cites historian Yuri
Slezkine as having “much to disagree with” in
my review of his book but provides no specifics. I
also have a lot of disagreements with Slezkine, although his general point that
Jews were an elite in the USSR is quite correct and a welcome addition to the
literature. In light of the disagreement about the involvement of Jews in the
security forces in Communist Poland, it's interesting that Slezkine emphasizes
the special role of Jews in the security service in the USSR. For example,
Slezkine notes that “even in the Cheka, Bolsheviks of Jewish origin combined
ideological commitment with literacy in ways that set them apart and propelled
them upward” (p. 177). And he writes that Leonard Schapiro is “probably
justified” in his comment that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the
hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with
and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator” (p. 177). Are those misquotes?

On other occasions, he has invented
evidence out of whole cloth. MacDonald has claimed, for example, that Jews are
exceptionally “aggressive” people, though he concedes that there is a “dearth of
scientific studies on this aspect of Jewish personality.” But the absence of
anything so banal as evidence has not prevented MacDonald from putting forth his
own theory about Jewish aggressiveness as the basis for everything from “Jewish
economic domination” to the “personal aggressiveness of Israeli society,” and
affixing them with footnotes to lend them an air of respectability. This is
another tactic that MacDonald favors, apparently believing that an excess of
footnotes will compensate for a conspicuous deficit of facts. [I do indeed claim that there
is a pattern whereby Jews have behaved aggressively towards the peoples they
have lived among. I acknowledge the thinness of controlled psychological
evidence, but that does not mean there is no evidence at all. And it certainly
doesn’t imply that I invented evidence. I have marshaled a reasonably convincing
(I think) array of examples, including Jewish self-perceptions and the
perceptions of their critics in different times and places. To provide a
comparison, I also cite evidence that Overseas Chinese have in general been far
less aggressive towards the people they have lived among. The argument
is not necessarily about the psychological traits of individual Jews that might
be revealed by a psychological study, but rather how the Jewish community as a
whole has acted. A theme of Jewish life is that there are major differences
between Jewish activist organizations and the rest of the Jewish population,
with the former far more committed, more intense, and more aggressive than the
latter. This is a theme of my article "Zionism and the Internal
Dynamics of Judaism" and is also a prominent theme in my analysis of
neoconservatism as a Jewish intellectual and political movement. The point is
that there is a pattern in which the Jewish community tends to be led by its
most aggressive, radical elements. It's also interesting that this issue has become a point
of contention between Mearsheimer and Walt and their critics, such as
Alan Dershowitz.
Mearsheimer and Walt emphasize the aggressive nature of Israel since its
beginnings (e.g., the writing and comments of David Ben Gurion and the
circumstances of the creation of Israel), the aggressive nature of
Israel's spying against the United States, and the aggressive response of the
Lobby to "take back the campuses" by preventing criticism of Israel in the
academic world. (Added evidence on the relatively
greater aggressiveness of Jews comes from this recent New York Times
article on the behavior of Jews, Muslims, and Hindus who are employees of
Wal-Mart in Bentonville, Arkansas. Only the Jews agitated for religious
neutrality in the county.)]

Seen against this background it is
little wonder that scholars worthy of the distinction dismiss MacDonald as an
anti-Semitic crank and an academic pretender. John Tooby, the director of the
Center of Evolutionary Biology at the University of California has said that
“MacDonald’s ideas--not just on Jews--violate fundamental principles of the
field.” The eminent MIT cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has pointed out that
MacDonald’s work lacks the basic components of scholarship, such as a control
group and a comparison with alternative hypotheses. Pinker has further noted
that MacDonald’s theory about the genetic cohesiveness of ethnic groups -- in
this case Jews -- are refuted by a wealth of data while his theses “collectively
add up to a consistently invidious portrayal of Jews, couched in value-laden,
disparaging language.” [See my replies to Tooby
and Pinker. Regarding
the alternate hypotheses issue, the concept of a control group does not apply to
group evolutionary strategies because they are open-ended and therefore able to
creatively meet environmental demands. Critics like Pinker fail to appreciate
the power and capabilities of human
intelligence. Humans are indeed unique in the animal kingdom, and theory
must accommodate their uniqueness. Evolutionary psychologists have erected the
image of a mythical human brain composed of modules designed to solve specific
problems. It just didn't happen that way. However, I have compared a
number of group strategies in the Diaspora Peoplespreface to the paperback edition of A People That Shall Dwell
Alone. For example, I contrast the relatively aggressive behavior of
Jews in America with the relatively passive behavior of the Overseas Chinese.
Such differences are doubtless a complex result of preexisting psychological
traits interacting with specific environmental contexts. My work differs from standard
dogma in much of evolutionary psychology because I take into account
well-documented mean group differences in intelligence (Ashkenazi Jews are a high-IQ
group) and personality (Jews are high in group cohesiveness), and I discuss how
these traits influence economic performance and interact with unique events in
history.The importance of the
environmental context is illustrated by the differing reactions to Jews by, for
example, European and Muslim societies. This issue is discussed in Separation and Its
Discontents.] To these criticisms it might be added that the supposed
authorities that are frequently referenced in his work -- like DePaul professor
Norman Finkelstein, columnist Joseph Sobran, and former Republican Congressman
Paul Findley -- are mere polemicists and anti-Israel activists with no special
expertise about Jews or Judaism and a history of disdain for both. [This is a textbook example of argumentumad
hominem. I have dozens of sources, and my only criterion in using them is
whether I think them reliable on the points I am citing them for. An adequate
argument against my position would have to show that my sources are wrong on these
points.]

At Home in Modern
Academia

Curiously for someone passionately
convinced of the dangers of all things Jewish, MacDonald is reluctant to defend
his views in public. In 2000, when MacDonald’s colleagues called on him to
publicly do just that, the professor begged off, assenting instead to a private
e-mail exchange among faculty members. [Written responses
are far more formal and one can do a bit of thinking and trying to get one's
ideas and facts straight. Frankly, I'm not much of a talker. The written word rather than
public debate is also the tactic that John Mearshiemer and Stephen Walt
are
pursuing in defending their
work on the Israel lobby against Dershowitz despite
Dershowitz's
desire for a public debate.
Indeed, I feel honored that Dershowitz
makes the same point about Mearsheimer and Walt that Laksin makes about me:
We cite Finkelstein.] The whole experience left MacDonald embittered.
“I'm done with Jews. I don't think I have any more to say about them,” he sniffed to the
Chronicle of Higher Education in 2000. [Sniffed??]

But it turned out that he did. Having
previously endorsed Charles Lindbergh’s position that “leaders of both the
British and Jewish races” were responsible for driving America to war against
Nazi Germany, MacDonald has become an avid publicist of the claim that the
“neoconservatives,” who supposedly plotted the war against Iraq, were motivated
by a “Jewish commitment.” In the distinctly conspiratorial manner that pervades
his work, MacDonald dismisses the inconvenient fact that the senior figures in
the Bush administration are not Jewish, explaining that it “makes excellent
psychological sense to have the spokespeople for any movement resemble the
people they are trying to convince.” Such is MacDonald’s idea of
scholarship. [The accusation of wild-eyed
conspiracy mongering doesn’t even have surface credibility, especially since the
well-publicized work of
Mearsheimer and Walt , although of course their
article has often been compared to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In
my article (which
is also part of a monograph on
Jewish influence), I go to special pains to deal with the roles and motives of
non-Jews in neoconservatism and I pay special attention to the Jewish
commitments of key neocons involved in the push for the Iraq war, such as Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith. The role of non-Jews in Jewish
intellectual and political movements is also a theme of The Culture of
Critique and is discussed in Chapter 6 of Separation and Its Discontents
as a general aspect of post-enlightenment Judaism’s attempts to manage
anti-Semitism. Laksin is particularly irritated with my comment that it “makes
excellent psychological sense to have the spokespeople for any movement resemble
the people they are trying to convince.” This is merely the psychological basis
of a very widespread phenomenon that goes well beyond Jewish issues to areas
like advertising and public relations generally. The need for the involvement of
non-Jews is especially acute for neoconservatism as a political movement:
Because neoconservative Jews constitute a tiny percentage of the electorate,
they need to make alliances with non-Jews whose perceived interests dovetail
with theirs. Non-Jews have a variety of reasons for being associated with Jewish
interests, including career advancement, close personal relationships or
admiration for individual Jews, and deeply held personal convictions.Regarding Lindbergh, Laksin leaves out from my
summary that Lindbergh also included the Roosevelt administration as a major
force leading the U.S. into war. My effort was to show
that Lindbergh was correct in his claim that Jews were a force. I never claimed
that Jews were the only force or that they were all powerful.]

That seems to suit the administration
at California State just fine. Although the university has had little to say
about his work on Jews, it has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to MacDonald’s
First Amendment rights, ignoring altogether the question of why it considers the
manufacture of stylized bigotry [!!!] an appropriate
avocation for a tenured scholar. MacDonald has not exactly returned the
compliment, inveighing against modern universities for their hostility to
“traditional institutions of European-American culture.” [I
can't find this quote. The transformation of American universities along the
lines mentioned by Laksin is a general theme of The
Culture of Critique.]For this, as for most social
phenomena he finds disagreeable, MacDonald faults the Jews.

MacDonald’s unabashed anti-Semitism
may set him apart from most of the extremists in modern academia, but he fully
shares in their delusions about being a persecuted truth-teller. In The
Culture of Critique, he bemoaned the plight of those who focused on the
“critical Jewish role” in destroying the traditional foundations of Western
countries, observing with dismay that they “have been relegated to the fringe of
intellectual and political discourse.” Unfortunately, in MacDonald’s case, that
fringe is a university, where his presence continues to sully the reputations of
genuine scholars who must suffer an association with a common anti-Semite. Then
again, there is no shortage of anti-Semitic activists posing as scholars in Middle
Eastern Studies Departments, who would probably make him feel at
home.[Neocons
like Daniel Pipes are leading the charge to put pressure on academics to prevent
criticism of Israel. Laksin obviously wants to extend this to any criticism of
Jews. This attempt to rid the academy of criticisms of Israel is featured in
both Mearsheimer and Walt's work on the
Israel Lobby and in
my article on
neoconservatism as a Jewish intellectual and political
movement.]

What’s needed is to bring the
entire discussion of Jewish influence out of the closet into the light of day.
The shock waves of the Mearsheimer and Walt piece are still reverberating, but
there is a realization, at least by
some, that open discussion is long overdue. And if
this ever does come about, it would be edifying for all concerned if it could be
accomplished without all the invective and guilt by association.